I sold my Olympus E-PL1 away late last week after having it for over a year and shooting about 6,000 pictures on it. I really liked the camera a lot. It was handsome looking, beautiful out of the camera JPGs, VERY reliable (it survived dunking in Niagara Falls!), and I found myself using it more than the D300 to take pictures of Hannah. And that\u2019s to say nothing of that the camera\u2019s a much more discreet device that I can bring around everywhere.<\/p>\n
There was a single problem with the little mirrorless compact though, and it was the awful habit of its 14-42mm lens constantly hunting around for the appropriate focus point in low light. When I\u2019m shooting in good light or outdoors, focusing is speedy. But indoors and with a hyper active Hannah, half the shots I took were invariably out of-of-focus. Occasionally that was because of subject motion \u2013 Hannah just wasn\u2019t going to sit still while waiting for the lens to decide its optimal focus – but even when Hannah was still, a lot of images still came out blurred for some reason even though at this stage I\u2019ve developed pretty robust camera-holding techniques now.<\/p>\n
Our friend Ann owns a similar camera and setup and I remember her remarking that that was a major difficulty for her too. Even Ling disliked using the E-PL1 because of this and preferred using that cheapo Panasonic LZ8 of hers.<\/p>\n
For a while I thought it was an issue with the camera, until upon trawling the Internet for notes from other users, discovered that the focusing difficulty was a known problem with this lens and the E-PL1, and there was a revised edition of the 14-42mm (a Mark II) that solved this issue. Moreover, there was some kind of conflict between the lens\u2019 shuttle vibration and lens elements when shot at a focal length range and at certain shuttle speeds, which resulted in vertical blurring (detailed analysis here<\/a>).<\/p>\n Unfortunately, I couldn\u2019t find someone to sell me a used copy of the updated lens, and a new one would have cost about $450 \u2013 ouch! Mildly exasperated, I decided to just sell the E-PL1 with the 14-42mm late last week for about half of what I originally paid for a year ago \u2013 within 12 hours of posting up the online ad, there were 17 persons all wanting the unit; should have asked for more \u2013 and look into an alternative.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/04\/blog2010photographyDSC_7459epl1.jpg\" "\\"blog2010photographyDSC_7459epl1\\"")